Professional Engineering

Most among us, at some point, will have worked for bad managers. If you’ve ever worked under a crassly despotic figurehead with the social niceties of a slug, communication skills of a lamppost, and morals of a bacterium, you’ll not, sadly, be alone. 

Good managers may be thin on the ground, and inspiring leaders even rarer. But engineers may well find themselves thrust into leadership roles without the back-up that will see them succeed, says Simon Mitchell, director of management consultancy Development Dimensions International. “Often you find people are promoted into leadership positions without the skills and understanding of what it takes to be a good leader – and that sets people up for failure,” says Mitchell.

Engineers, for example, may be expert product designers or great at managing risk. They carve out a reputation for excellence that sees them rise up the corporate food chain. Their talents see them given management positions – but their expertise isn’t what is required to lead effectively. Mitchell adds: “Very few engineers go into engineering because they want to be leaders. They would probably choose another profession if so. 

“But sometimes what happens in an organisation is that they gain a reputation for excellence in their chosen field that sees them promoted into a leadership position, but being design engineers, say, they don’t necessarily know how to lead.”

Whether leadership skills can be taught is open to debate. Sam Cockerill, an independent consultant and graduate of the Sainsbury Management Fellows scheme, which funds high-flying engineers to take MBA courses, believes that good leaders become so essentially through experience. Rather than being taught didactically how to lead, they instead learn experientially. Cockerill says: “Becoming a good leader is as much about reflecting on the situations and approaches that you’ve experienced in the past, and deriving from those clarity in your own mind about the vision and the direction that you believe is appropriate for your organisation and the people that you are leading. 

“Then you must be able to communicate that vision and the ideas behind it in a way that inspires people and brings them along in the direction of travel.” Paradoxically, then, Cockerill notes, “I don’t believe leadership skills can be taught – but they can be learnt”.

Mitchell says: “I’m often asked whether good leaders are born or made – the answer is both. But it’s wrong to think that any leader is born with all the skills they need to be a leader – and it’s wrong to think that leaders can’t develop skills they haven’t got.”

Gary Wyles is managing director of Festo in the UK and also runs the company’s training and development division. This wing of the company develops engineers’ sales and communication skills as well as general management abilities for both Festo’s staff and engineers among its customers. The training side of the business developed to encompass courses on technology, sales, services and also leadership. “Do engineers make good leaders? That’s the million-dollar question,” Wyles says. “If we talk about selling skills or maybe just general communication skills with customers, I think engineers are often coming from a position of disadvantage. 

“What I mean is that engineers are really trained to identify and understand all of the potential things that could go wrong. Because they have to manage and plan for problems, they can be a little big negative in their approach to communication.” Another example of where engineers might struggle is that, having seen a customer’s problem many times in the past, they fail to explain fully where things have gone wrong to the client. Wyles says: “The untrained engineer who goes into sales had a tendency not to properly explore the needs of the customer, making the assumption that, because they’ve seen the problem before, the solution is going to be the same.”